Young Korean pro Kim Eunji banned for 1 year for AI cheating

[Ferran]

True... *If* what she is even telling the truth here. And who is to say that this is the only such incident? It’s the only one she’s apologized for, but it’s also the only match in which she was caught.

Yep. Maybe she IS lying and she DIDN'T cheat.

Take care.

[Kirby]

Another angle on this. Inseong recently introduced an anti-cheating committee into the Yunguseng Dojang. If someone is determined to be cheating, they are kicked out of the program.

Is he being too harsh? What if the participant is only 13?

[Kirby]

True... *If* what she is even telling the truth here. And who is to say that this is the only such incident? It’s the only one she’s apologized for, but it’s also the only match in which she was caught.

Yep. Maybe she IS lying and she DIDN'T cheat.

Take care.

You really think she’s the victim here, don’t you?

[explo]

Another angle on this. Inseong recently introduced an anti-cheating committee into the Yunguseng Dojang. If someone is determined to be cheating, they are kicked out of the program.

Is he being too harsh? What if the participant is only 13?

I don't think he is too harsh, but this is hardly the same situation.

[Kirby]

Another angle on this. Inseong recently introduced an anti-cheating committee into the Yunguseng Dojang. If someone is determined to be cheating, they are kicked out of the program.

Is he being too harsh? What if the participant is only 13?

I don't think he is too harsh, but this is hardly the same situation.

Can you elaborate? One difference I see is that Eunji is robbing others of money, but in the Yunguseng Dojang, there’s no prize money on the line. Are there other differences that you find to be relevant?

[jlt]

The difference is obvious no? People excluded from the Yunguseng Dojang can continue to play go and take lessons elsewhere. For them, go is just a hobby.

Professionals who are banned for life have spent most of their lives developing just one skill, and can no longer get a job which values that skill.

[Kirby]

1. An ex-pro can still make a living with teaching or YouTube, no problem. Just look at Kim Seongryong. They can also play go or do whatever. The only thing they are losing is affiliation with that pro organization.

2. In this case, the girl is 13 years old. She could go to middle school, high school, college, and live a normal life. No problem.

I can kinda get it if you think that people shouldn’t be excluded from go organizations for first offense cheating. I don’t share that opinion, but at least it’s fathomable.

But when you say an amateur organization can ban cheaters, but pros should get special status (ie. live above the law), then I believe you have a double standard.

[John Fairbairn]

An ex-pro can still make a living with teaching or YouTube, no problem. Just look at Kim Seongryong.

Actually you could argue that all these teenage kids and all the baggage they brought with them (such as Mickey Moue time limits) have already decimated the careers of people like Kim Seong-ryong. That was done fairly enough (though allowing then in was perhaps a misguided move by the go associations), but now some little *****s want to rub salt in the wound Literally, almost, come to think of it, if you consider how they party their way through the CV miasma and end up killing their grannies.

I remember when I was a lad....

[jlt]

I agree that an ex-pro won't starve. Still, banning from a pro organization (=where you have your best chances to get a source of income, and where you have already invested 12 hours/day for many years) has much more impact on your life than banning from an amateur organization (=place where you spend a couple of hours a week, which can easily be replaced by an equivalent one).

[Ferran]

You really think she’s the victim here, don’t you?

I did say I didn't want to get into guilt or not, I believe, but I'll recap several items.

There are several questions: did she cheat? should she be punished? should she be the only one punished? how should she be punished? Why? Are we being consequent?

Also, there's a... call it a personal background. Where I come from, children's (and teens) participation in adult activities is heavily regulated and, by and large, followed in spirit as well as form. A child might earn a lot, might be climbing the steps of a profession that will make him (likely *him*, so far) millionaire in his teens. But he's still a child. There are duties towards his education and upbringing his environment can't simply toss aside for bucks.

Did she cheat? I don't know. There are two further levels, here. As a pro, I don't give a damn if she cheats or not. Not my business, not my association; I like games: if pros start doping their games, I'll follow amateurs (that's what I do with other sports). As a kid, if she cheated or not opens a can or worms. I've pointed several facets of it. And there are simply too many ways the words and actions of a teenager thrust into an adult world can be twisted and shaped. I don't trust three degress-removed accounts of what happened. Nor do I like what's transpiring about the process. As a kid.

Should she be punished? If there's enough evidence (and I mean evidence, not "my adults had me sign a confession"), sure. If there's not enough evidence, it's troublesome. The proportion of such punishment... it escapes my knowledge. I *am* against binary solution sets. This conversation is veering, time and again, towards "yes / no" and "but you saids". Not agreeing with expelling a kid for life does not equal "she should get scot free".

I already mentioned I do consider her adult enviroment partially responsible. To what extent, I don't know. But it wouldn't be the first time I learn of a kid thrown under the bus. "She did what!? Why, I'd never...!"

Also, and I think that's an elephant in the room (one of many), the even has put the KBA in the spotlight. Not in a good way. Leela zero has been out for 3 years. CoViD-19 has been in the open for almost a year. Shogi had its world-shattering scandal 4 years ago. And yet this has caught the procedures against cheating in the KBA out for drinks.

Now, why should she be punished also has implications in how severely she should be. If you want to teach *her* a lesson, then she has to be able to overcome that. If you want to teach *others* a lesson, she doesn't need to. What the *goal* of the punishment determines the punishment. And, right now, the only goal I see is to save the KBA's face. Which means nothing to me. Actually, it meant something a week ago: I'm respecting it less and less; not only because of this, but it's playing a part.

Then, the sentence you quoted links to my last question. Are we being consequent? Someone else would have to judge *me*, but I think that the same way we're turning this into a black/white question, we're choosing our own data. That's... questionable. Regarding that sentence... I'd be very wary of accepting the word of a teenager under such pressure, either way. But I find it quirky, at least, that we seem to accept that she was telling the truth when she said she cheated, but then question the truth of when she said she did. Let's be clear: she HAS lied. She has (*) both said "A" and "NOT A"; one of them has to be false. But this does not clear anything at all; rather, it muddies it further.

I'm sorry if I'm not being clear enough. I am not if I'm not being clear-CUT enough. Does that make sense?

Take care.

(*) I'm judging the data as I have it, not what she might have actually said or not. All I have, again, is data at several removes.

[Kirby]

Mickey Moue time limits

C’mon, man...

I agree that an ex-pro won't starve. Still, banning from a pro organization (=where you have your best chances to get a source of income, and where you have already invested 12 hours/day for many years) has much more impact on your life than banning from an amateur organization (=place where you spend a couple of hours a week, which can easily be replaced by an equivalent one).

Pro organizations can only have impact and prestige when they are held to high standard. We may think we are giving a second chance by being lenient to a cheater pro, but we actually reduce the value of the pro status of everyone else in the organization.

All of those folks spending 12 hours a week who didn’t make pro - and all of those who made it - are cheated because we now say that cheaters can be pros.

---

A couple of other items that might not be clear:
1. The owner of KataGui was contacted about the potential cheating before Eunji admitted it. He noted that there was an entry in the DB of someone playing out Eunji and Lee Youngu's game, which matched the time of the game. It's unclear whether it was Eunji herself who was inputting the game, though.


2. Some folks are more upset about Eunji's confession letter than the actual incident. That's because some folks believe that she has cheated at least 3 times based on how exactly moves match up with KataGo in these matches. But in her apology letter, she kind of brushes it off and acts like she wasn't really thinking and didn't know that she was cheating. Some folks think she's lying directly.

While I advocate for Eunji's punishment, I don't know how much weight I put into #2. I think there's a good chance she's cheated at least 3 times, but I don't think that the analysis that was done on those games is necessarily conclusive.

[Uberdude]

Re 1 the Katagui record, unless there's some evidence it was her (like her IP address or account registered with her email) not one of the thousands of observers doing it that is irrelevant. When I am watching a live pro game these days I will often input the moves into Lizzie locally and follow along, exploring variations and using it to inform my kibitz. If I didn't have a powerful GPU I would use some online service like Katagui. So that could be a perfectly innocent explantation. This is yet another example of why you need control groups: did anyone check if Shin Jinseo's or any other prominent pro's games were in there at the same time as they were played. Maybe most pro games which are a featured broadcast have live Katagui records from interested kibitzers.

Re 2. If she is lying in the confession letter about the cheating, I think it's more likely that it was about the nature of it (that it wasn't the opportunistic copying from a commentary window opened, but planned by running her own bot and she could have done it multiple times) that she didn't cheat and falsely confessed to get a lighter punishment than if she was found guilty later even though truly innocent. False confessions are more likely, like in the US prison system, when it is well known that harsh punishments are near certain on conviction, but here we had talk of cleaning toilets and the KBA had already shown its dithering and potential preferential treatment of the future superstar.

[SoDesuNe]

I agree that an ex-pro won't starve. Still, banning from a pro organization (=where you have your best chances to get a source of income, and where you have already invested 12 hours/day for many years) has much more impact on your life than banning from an amateur organization (=place where you spend a couple of hours a week, which can easily be replaced by an equivalent one).

Pro organizations can only have impact and prestige when they are held to high standard. We may think we are giving a second chance by being lenient to a cheater pro, but we actually reduce the value of the pro status of everyone else in the organization.

Pro organisations or mere professional associations. You can certainly attribute prestige to the game of go and thus by proxy to its governing body... by itself they both remain inanimate objects though (funnily enough chess has had an elitism debate not long ago). That's why the prestige of professional associations/professions change over time. It's a human value, given by humans. And humans are fickle things. Needless to say, I don't think any pro go organisation necessarily has "prestige" and I don't hold them to a higher standard than my own professional association.

But yeah, for your feelings to remain intact it might be best to exclude cheaters from the pro organisation. Then again your feelings should not be the basis to another person's sentence. That's called bias.

Also, nobody in this thread is - per se - lenient to cheating pros as far as I can tell. There should be consequences. What a lot of people do is questioning whether the outcry for blood, sorry, immediate life-time-ban is proportional, adequate regarding future incidents or even justified given the "evidence" and negligence by the KBA in cheating matters.

As Ferran wrote, the problem could lie whether or not you're willing to see the matter in shades of gray rather than black and white.

Thirdly if you want to devalue all members of a trade because you experienced one black sheep, that is again on you. I guess in everyday life you won't do this for practical reasons but that double-standard-discussion probably has nothing to do with the matter at hand ; )

Chess has had a lot of GMs ("pros"), who were caught cheating. Even recently. I don't see the general image of a chess player to be in decline. I don't see chess as a game in decline, quite the opposite. But chess does a lot to prevent cheating and as John Fairbairn pointed out, chess also has zero-tolerance-policies in place: If you get caught with a cellphone in the playing area, you are out and possibly face a temporary ban.

So live and (let) learn.

[John Fairbairn]

I'm certainly no expert in oriental legal systems, and I don't believe anyone else here is either. But I do know their systems are different from ours in the UK, and I'm fairly sure they differ from the US. One big difference, I believe, is that defence counsel have less involvement in the initial stages of interrogation (which makes it a bit like the French prosecutorial system), and a lot of weight is put on eliciting confessions. Confessions obtained without the presence of defence counsel (and, I believe, often unsigned) thus carry far less weight in the minds of the public. I further believe the confession is often seen simply as a step in preserving social harmony - anything to avoid the adversarial systems typical of the west.

The present cheating case is not a legal case, of course. But I imagine that when people of any country set up organisations with rules, they inevitably reflect the legal system they live under. I would therefore expect a confession in this case to bear a different weight from that that would put on it by people from different countries.

There is an impression nowadays, especially among younger people, and I have no doubt the internet fuels this, that we all live now in a global village with the same systems, beliefs and mores everywhere. Poppycock.

[RobertJasiek]

IP address or email account use are only indicators but not evidence in themselves, even if the provider confirms registered data. Either might be hacked.